Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 261504 (987%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (approximately 918%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 98112 (918%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (approximately 154%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16512 (154%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.